Quote Originally Posted by Cilia View Post
The house of cards trembling in the wind
LoL, lmao even.

There's a few extreme problems with your reasoning here.

First, by your own logic, any sufficiently advanced civilization could be brought to ruin by a madman or otherworldly encounter. We can look to literally every encounter the WoL has ever had starting in Heavensward when we started to be told of primals so powerful they could end the entire star (Warring Triad, any Heavensward Primal that sups on the Warring Triad, Allag in general). Even before that, there was the Cloud of Darkness in ARR. We run into more and more as time goes on, what with the writers upping the ante and all. Literally saved from our own act of turning the Omega Weapon on by the grace that it just flipped off and burrowed down to do experiments, rather than raze the Source or interfere or interact with the Garleans/Stormblood story at all.

Then there's the two civilizations shown in the front 2/3rds of The Dead Ends. The plagued otter people and the Karellians. Most notably the Karellians were an advanced science fiction civilization completely bereft of magic or godlike powers.

Second, and more importantly, you're guilty of extreme bias towards the Ascians AND you've dehumanized them to the point that you are strawmanning them as badly, or perhaps worse than, the Venat metaphor BS scene.

Think about what The Final Days did. Think about what the Zodiark sacrifices did. As we're told, quite a lot of Ascians were killed by The Final Days. Out of the remainder, volunteers of half the remaining population offered up their lives to make Zodiark.

The times got tough, and then the best of the Ascians either fell victim to Blasphemies OR nobly gave their lives to make a savior.

In other words, the people in their populace who had resilience/nobility/stalwart hearts as part of their personality were very few in number after both of these events transpired.

Most of their elders and those closest to lives fulfilled likely gave themselves up if not killed.

Riding on the coattails of this traumatic, devastating event came Venat and her civil war. Not only were the worst members of the Ascian's society the only ones left, half of them decided to make war in a world that had been without it for time out of mind, and wars hardly help anyone recover from trauma.

No earnest efforts were made to help the Ascians bounce back. Hydaelyn was not made in good faith. She was never to be a mere binding for Zodiark.

How would they fare if prepared and told the truth? What could have their collective society come up with, if they'd had the truth from the start? Cast the die for enough players, and eventually you get critical successes, too. Do you really struggle to believe that the Azem of old, along with his mentor, along with the entire Convocation with truth in hand could not stop Meteion?

If not, why then do you believe that just the WoL and Zenos using two Ascian incantations can (I guess technically 3 if we include the creation rites for Shinryu)?